Sub-realismo criollo
An upside-down world, where everything has a slight tendency to fall off… This may be the case if you live on the northern hemisphere of this planet and mind taking a look down there. Yet, if you are raised in the underdeveloped south, you acquire a different awareness of gravity, balance and cultural resistance.
Everything is quite different in the south. Down here, right here, in Argentina, a place that could rightfully be the centre of the whole universe, Marcos López once “grasped the camera as an orphan child would grasp his nun’s skirt”. Since then and for more than two decades, a story has been unfolding about the unexpected things that occur when the south tries to get a little closer to the north and to its dream industry of hypes and prosperity formulas.
For López, the experience of living in Argentina is equivalent to inhabiting the other side of a broken mirror:
As an outcast confined in a cell, you look through the broken glass. You need to, precisely because you are the reflection. But then, your gaze comes back to the north and slaps our faces as if it were a degenerated, threatening monster, willing to devour us all for the years of post-colonial, capitalist deprivation it carries on its back.
Made out of photographs, poems and writings, the complex visual universe of Marcos López is formulated as a concise observational meta-commentary on this particular “mirror effect”, produced within a global senseless community. His glamorously kitsch aesthetic was born in the mid-nineties. Since then a series of projects and publications have appeared; among them “Urban Scenes” (1999), “Pop Latino” (2000), “The Player” (2006) or “Sub-realismo criollo”, his most recent work, in progress since 2005, all of which Lopez has won international acclaim for as one of the leading figures of Argentinean contemporary photography.
It is noon and the barrio throws over you the shadow of its old depressing walls. Not a soul in the streets. A waiter comes and asks to add your name in the reservation list. His green fluorescent T-shirt matches perfectly the turquoise walls, while the radio is on, playing the latest hits of resentment. Boredom, some bottles of Santa Fe beer left in front of a huge Coca-Cola advertising panel, the marks of red lipstick on your cup, a world swamped with traditional popular symbols and imported modernity… López could go on telling stories forever.
Highly orchestrated soap operas full of saturated colours, exaggerated gestures, bad actors and ugly settings, all imbued with a strong dose of a self-taught Argentinean surrealism. In Marcos López’s universe everything is purposely tagged as sub, under- or hyper-, in the same way that everything becomes a question of lack and excess in the absurd world that surrounds him.
What happens when the modality of “formal” bad taste, as seen, for instance, in Martin Parr´s popular iconography of burger restaurants and tourist leisure parks, is introduced in foreign cultural settings? What happens when kitsch in all its plethora is reflected onto the broken mirror? Well, then it becomes a signifying meta-kitch, i.e. an even more eloquent performative simulacrum of the original, as Marcos López suggests.
“Could resorting to jokes, masks and bright colours be just a way of distancing oneself, of not being too serious, of avoiding the intense feel of direct contact, body to body, soul to soul?”, wonders the artist. Back in the early nineties, he recalls himself passing gloriously from his black and white psychological portraits to colour. Ecstatic, he used to drink toasting to photography as a natural heir of Mexican mural art. But soon, the phantoms of the old comrades would disappear, second thoughts would take over and eventually habits would change. Marcos has learned the lesson: he hardly drinks alcohol in public gatherings of more than three people! What survives from his “revolutionary” past, are the seeds of a growing irony and scepticism towards both the ethics of underdevelopment and the medium of photography.
“The attempt to promote an illusory belief that life is worth it, is useless. The only secret for a good portrait is to create an atmosphere that can show this desolation, this nothingness”. In López’s theatrically staged pictures, the apparent shift from the real into the realm of myth -be it religion, as in “Roast in Mendiolaza” (2001), or pure flesh fiction as in “Dressing Room” (2004)- operates, paradoxically, as an ironic and painful metaphor of the mutilation of dreams. It produces a sudden landing to reality and it transforms blood, flesh and myth to enacted paraphernalia of a homeland that hurts, reminding us that the real world is the one made of annihilated hopes.
Though clearly “fabricated in Argentina” and for Argentineans, López’s psychological penetration of the grotesque transgresses universal territories. His underdeveloped, deformed Warhol aesthetics is charged with the bittersweet flavour that inevitably any critical observation produced in the south inherits. Namely, this “curse” and “blessing” of belonging in the so-called “periphery” is what attributes to his sseemingly hilarious and hyperbolic imagery a documentary aura that captures the spirit of his reality. Down here, on the other side of the mirror, photography becomes an “autopsy of failure”, exposing in all its glory the act of “performing” stuffed illusions and slippery identities, just before the lights faint, just before identity surrenders to nothingness…
Pessimist, nihilist, more sceptical than ever? Lopez’s whole artistic practice critically questions the paramount role of imitation and repetition within the contemporary context of the imported cultural and consumerism models. “It is not necessary to take two hundred portraits in the American South, as Richard Avedon once did, in order to say what is left to be said”, reflects the artist in his writings. After more than two decades of commitment to his medium, he confesses being a bit overwhelmed by digital excess and by the pressure implied when belonging to the contemporary art “set”. “To tell the truth, I feel like it is time to retire, the way boxers do. I would like to go towards religion. I would like to have more faith…”
©All pictures: Marcos López
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved
Published in Eyemazing 04/2008
An upside-down world, where everything has a slight tendency to fall off… This may be the case if you live on the northern hemisphere of this planet and mind taking a look down there. Yet, if you are raised in the underdeveloped south, you acquire a different awareness of gravity, balance and cultural resistance.
Everything is quite different in the south. Down here, right here, in Argentina, a place that could rightfully be the centre of the whole universe, Marcos López once “grasped the camera as an orphan child would grasp his nun’s skirt”. Since then and for more than two decades, a story has been unfolding about the unexpected things that occur when the south tries to get a little closer to the north and to its dream industry of hypes and prosperity formulas.
For López, the experience of living in Argentina is equivalent to inhabiting the other side of a broken mirror:
As an outcast confined in a cell, you look through the broken glass. You need to, precisely because you are the reflection. But then, your gaze comes back to the north and slaps our faces as if it were a degenerated, threatening monster, willing to devour us all for the years of post-colonial, capitalist deprivation it carries on its back.
Made out of photographs, poems and writings, the complex visual universe of Marcos López is formulated as a concise observational meta-commentary on this particular “mirror effect”, produced within a global senseless community. His glamorously kitsch aesthetic was born in the mid-nineties. Since then a series of projects and publications have appeared; among them “Urban Scenes” (1999), “Pop Latino” (2000), “The Player” (2006) or “Sub-realismo criollo”, his most recent work, in progress since 2005, all of which Lopez has won international acclaim for as one of the leading figures of Argentinean contemporary photography.
It is noon and the barrio throws over you the shadow of its old depressing walls. Not a soul in the streets. A waiter comes and asks to add your name in the reservation list. His green fluorescent T-shirt matches perfectly the turquoise walls, while the radio is on, playing the latest hits of resentment. Boredom, some bottles of Santa Fe beer left in front of a huge Coca-Cola advertising panel, the marks of red lipstick on your cup, a world swamped with traditional popular symbols and imported modernity… López could go on telling stories forever.
Highly orchestrated soap operas full of saturated colours, exaggerated gestures, bad actors and ugly settings, all imbued with a strong dose of a self-taught Argentinean surrealism. In Marcos López’s universe everything is purposely tagged as sub, under- or hyper-, in the same way that everything becomes a question of lack and excess in the absurd world that surrounds him.
What happens when the modality of “formal” bad taste, as seen, for instance, in Martin Parr´s popular iconography of burger restaurants and tourist leisure parks, is introduced in foreign cultural settings? What happens when kitsch in all its plethora is reflected onto the broken mirror? Well, then it becomes a signifying meta-kitch, i.e. an even more eloquent performative simulacrum of the original, as Marcos López suggests.
“Could resorting to jokes, masks and bright colours be just a way of distancing oneself, of not being too serious, of avoiding the intense feel of direct contact, body to body, soul to soul?”, wonders the artist. Back in the early nineties, he recalls himself passing gloriously from his black and white psychological portraits to colour. Ecstatic, he used to drink toasting to photography as a natural heir of Mexican mural art. But soon, the phantoms of the old comrades would disappear, second thoughts would take over and eventually habits would change. Marcos has learned the lesson: he hardly drinks alcohol in public gatherings of more than three people! What survives from his “revolutionary” past, are the seeds of a growing irony and scepticism towards both the ethics of underdevelopment and the medium of photography.
“The attempt to promote an illusory belief that life is worth it, is useless. The only secret for a good portrait is to create an atmosphere that can show this desolation, this nothingness”. In López’s theatrically staged pictures, the apparent shift from the real into the realm of myth -be it religion, as in “Roast in Mendiolaza” (2001), or pure flesh fiction as in “Dressing Room” (2004)- operates, paradoxically, as an ironic and painful metaphor of the mutilation of dreams. It produces a sudden landing to reality and it transforms blood, flesh and myth to enacted paraphernalia of a homeland that hurts, reminding us that the real world is the one made of annihilated hopes.
Though clearly “fabricated in Argentina” and for Argentineans, López’s psychological penetration of the grotesque transgresses universal territories. His underdeveloped, deformed Warhol aesthetics is charged with the bittersweet flavour that inevitably any critical observation produced in the south inherits. Namely, this “curse” and “blessing” of belonging in the so-called “periphery” is what attributes to his sseemingly hilarious and hyperbolic imagery a documentary aura that captures the spirit of his reality. Down here, on the other side of the mirror, photography becomes an “autopsy of failure”, exposing in all its glory the act of “performing” stuffed illusions and slippery identities, just before the lights faint, just before identity surrenders to nothingness…
Pessimist, nihilist, more sceptical than ever? Lopez’s whole artistic practice critically questions the paramount role of imitation and repetition within the contemporary context of the imported cultural and consumerism models. “It is not necessary to take two hundred portraits in the American South, as Richard Avedon once did, in order to say what is left to be said”, reflects the artist in his writings. After more than two decades of commitment to his medium, he confesses being a bit overwhelmed by digital excess and by the pressure implied when belonging to the contemporary art “set”. “To tell the truth, I feel like it is time to retire, the way boxers do. I would like to go towards religion. I would like to have more faith…”
©All pictures: Marcos López
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved
Published in Eyemazing 04/2008
